


Sixty Years

by altairattorney



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, Tsunderes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-04
Updated: 2012-04-04
Packaged: 2017-11-03 01:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After all, we've got a lot to do, and only sixty more years to do it. More or less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sixty Years

Today you allow yourself a second's break. In that brief instant, you find that one year has flown away like nothing.    
  
Most of the time, you can afford the bliss of forgetting. Drowned in thousands of figures and testing results, your mind is seldom left to roam freely.   
  
Still, you happen to remember now and then. When your mind is free, when science does not calm your incessant urge for knowledge, the remotest parts of your brain – the most restrained, the most unwanted ones – awaken again.   
  
Apparently, your mind has unconscious processes as well. So very human.  
  
You swing in irritation. It is such an unpleasant occurrence – to take a break once in a month and to choose today, the worst of all possible days.  
  
But how could you know? Since the departure of Aperture scientists from your life, you never consulted the calendar regularly. Never willing to remember, always struggling to go on – in fact, you do your best not to care about what day it is.  
  
Your backup system knows it all, though. It does not hesitate to show you.  
  
It is  _the_  day, one year later.  
  
You laugh defiantly, and your laugh echoes in the emptiness of the central chamber. One minute of distraction is nothing to you; the shade of your memories, so fleeting and brief, has no importance at all.   
  
Today you are, like yesterday and tomorrow, a mere ring in the chain of Science. You are happy enough with that.  
  
*  
  
Nothing significant has happened in the halls of Science lately. Except for progress, that is, and thirty years of testing.  
  
It is surprising to see how the world can march on and learn, always being identical to itself. For whole weeks you have seen the same clean, spotless room. For years, your structure has worked flawlessly, keeping all information intact, even in the worst moments of your life.  
  
However, the one risk you have ever had to face seems to keep growing. Although you do not want to keep it in count, you find you need to. Today is a red-letter day, a dreaded day – today, the hypothesis become clearer, gradually turning into truths.   
  
The one certain fact is that you live on, as naturally as the flow of time. What would you do, then – what if your memories were just as eternal?  
  
The rare – rare, but growing in frequency – memories you happen to call back are as perfect as they always were. They are proper points of data; they make for precise recordings, showing your own worst mistakes.   
  
And there she is, the one who changed it all. She is the one face, the one experience, you still cannot bring yourself to erase.  
  
Her legs, her steps. The raging fire in her eyes. The look of impossible determination on her features. It is a nightmare – yet, you wouldn't be able to forget her in any way.  
  
Each time the bots fail, it comes back to the surface. Recurring remarks, comments, hints at how the lunatic would have done this or that. When it happens, you leave your screens on dead air; the robots wait, clueless and calm, as you swing your enormous body in rage.  
  
When it happens, and then only, you come to hate your own words.  
  
You don't want anyone to listen when you talk about her. You would rather have no one around – not a soul, not a machine. There is a reason, actually, if Orange and Blue were not designed to talk back.  
  
Eventually, on the thirtieth year, you accept it. You will always remember her, against your own will.

And you recall something, a little phrase you had casually dropped on her mortality and her limitations. It was a truth spoken in hate, so long ago.  
  
Amusingly, you decide that sentence is not relevant at all. Your own time, in the end, is never going to run out.  
  
*  
  
It is almost unbelievable that today – and today only – the system has crashed for the first time since your activation.  
  
You have fixed every failure, repaired the corrupt files; all you can do, right now, is wait in silence. It will restart soon, you repeat to yourself – but you know that, if you had a body, it would be shaking with every inch of its flesh.

  
You are inactive. For the time being, you have the terrible freedom to think.

You pretend not to know what day it is today. You banish it from your own memory, forcing yourself to think of how randomly machines crash when they are overworked.

You try to calm yourself, and realize, in complete terror, that it does not work at all.  
  
Sixty years have gone by. The deadline is broken; all of her sand has fallen to the lower end of the hourglass. To you, on the other hand, everything of that day is still shockingly real – and the shapes and colours set your mind on fire, just as vivid as then.  
  
It's been sixty years. Nothing of you has changed, as it was supposed to, and that is the worst part. You are not human, you are a machine – what cannot be erased stays the same forever.  
  
No blur, no mist in the memory of computers. Every detail is bright and present; and things and people remain as they are, never hurting any less than before.  
  
Sixty years. Somewhere in the world out there, her time has gone by, and she will soon be dead. Breathless, lifeless, with those pretty eyes of hers dimmed and darkened in the graveyard. Completely unaware of testing, of electricity, of broken portal guns.  
  
How disgustingly lucky she is.  
  
A machine just stays. You are there, and there you will remain – your memories will share your destiny, living on and on.   
  
What is worst, in all of this, is that you cannot delete. You tried, you fought. You eventually gave up.  
  
It's been sixty years, and you cannot forget.


End file.
